No News. No, Really
February 8, 2008
A colleague (who shall remain nameless) sent me at 0700 Eastern this morning, Friday, February 8, 2008. To brighten this gloomy day in Harrod’s Creek, he wrote: “Your site indeed does have excellent content. It could be more ‘newsy’ though, which would encourage people to come back daily.”
Blog Changes Coming
Great comment, and I have begun taking baby steps to improve this Web log. It’s not even a month old, and I know I have to invest more time in this beastie. In the next two weeks, I want to introduce a three-column format, and I will include links to news. Personally, I dislike news because it is too easy to whack out a “press release”, post it on a Free news release distributions, and sit back while the tireless Topix.net and Google.com bots index the document. Sometimes, a few seconds after the ping server spits out a packet, the “press release” turns up in one of my alert mechanisms. Instant news — sort of. Not for me, sorry.
The other change will be the inclusion of some advertising. My son, who runs a thriving Google-centric integration business, reminded me, “Dad, you are getting traffic. Use AdSense to generate some revenue.” As a docile father, I will take his suggestion. We will put the text ads in the outside column of the new “magazine” layout we will be using. I will also write an essay about what he is doing and why it is representative of the change taking place in fixing a “broken” search system. Not news. But if you are struggling with a multi-million dollar investment in a behind-the-firewall system that users find a thorn in their britches, you will want to know how to make the pain go away without major surgery. You won’t find this information on most search and content processing vendors’ Web sites. Nor will you get much guidance from the search “experts” involved in search engine optimization, shilling for vendors with deep pockets, or from analysts opining about the “size” of the market for “enterprise search”, whatever that phrase means. You will get that information here, though. No links in this paragraph. I don’t want hate mail.
Let me be perfectly clear, as our late, beloved, President Richard Nixon used as an audio filler, “The content of this Web log is NOT news.” If you look at the posts, I have been using this Web log to contain selected information I couldn’t shoehorn into my new study Beyond Search: What to Do When Your Search System Doesn’t Work (in press at Gilbane Group now, publication date is April 2008).
Some News Will Creep In
It is true that I have commented on some information that is garnering sustained financial and media attention; for example, the issues that must be satisfactorily resolved if Microsoft succeeds in its hostile take over of Yahoo. Unless a white knight gallops into Mountain View, California, soon, Micro-Hoo will be born. I’ve also made a few observations about the Microsoft – Fast tie up. Although 1 /36th the dollar amount of the Yahoo deal — the Microsoft – Fast buyout is interesting. The cultural, technical, social, and financial issues of this deal are significant. My angle is that Fast Search & Transfer was the company to turn its back on Web indexing and advertising at the moment Google was bursting from the starting blocks. Fast Search’s management sold its Web search site AllTheWeb.com and its advertising technology at the moment Google embraced these two initiatives. We have, therefore, a fascinating story with useful lessons about a single decision’s impact. Google’s market cap today is $157.9 billion and Fast Search’s is $1.2 billion. I think this decision is a pivotal event in online search and content processing.
In my opinion, Fast Search was in 2003 – 2004 the one company with high-speed indexing and query processing technology comparable to Google’s. When Fast Search & Transfer withdrew from Web indexing, Google had zero significant competition. AltaVista.com had fallen off the competitive radar under Hewlett-Packard’s mismanagement.
Fast Search bet the farm on “enterprise search”. Google bet on Web search and advertising sector. Here’s a what – if question to consider, “What if Fast Search had fought head-to-head with Google? Perhaps a business historian will dig into this more deeply.
I have several posts in the works that are definitely non-news. Later today, I will offer some observations about today’s taxonomy fad. I have some information about social search, and I put particular emphasis on the weaknesses of this sub-species of information retrieval; namely, the leader is Google. The other folks are doing “social search” roughly in the same way a high school soccer team plays football against the Brazilian national team. The game is the same, but the years of experience the Brazilians have translate into an easy win. I think this is a controversial statement. Is it news? No.
Stealth Feature to Début
The revamped Web log will include a “stealth feature”. (In Silicon Valley speak, this means something anyone can do but when kept secret becomes a “secret”.) I don’t want to let the digital cat out of the Web bag yet, but you will be able to get insight into how some of the major search and content processing developed. I will post some original information on my archive Web site and summarize the key points in a Web log posting in this forum.
We have been getting an increasing number of off-topic comments. I’m deleting these. My editorial policy is that substantive comments germane to search and content processing are fine. You may disagree with me, explain a point in a different way, or provide supplemental information. Using the comments section to get a person to buy stolen software, acquire Canadian drugs, connect with Clara (a popular spammer surname) for a good time, or the other wacko stuff is out of bounds.
Okay, Here’s Some Real News
For the news mavens, I’ve included some hot links in this announcement of non news. Here’s one to Google’s version of Topix.net’s local news service. (Hurry, these newsy links go dead pretty quickly, which is one reason I don’t do news.) You don’t need me to tell you what this means to Topix.net. It seems that when you search for Arnoldit on Google, the Govern – ator comes up first. Now that’s a interesting twist in Google’s relevancy algorithm.,
Stephen Arnold, February 8, 2008
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